Abstract:
fPTi-movements in English involve both Subjacency and grammatical w/z-movements.
Subjacency is one of the non-parameterised principles or language universals, which has
constraints on w/j-movements. Although this language universal is strictly observed in
languages like English, it is not so in some languages. The knowledge of Subjacency and
grammatical w/j-movements is believed to be part of a person's unconscious linguistic
knowledge (I-language). The knowledge of Subjacency tells a person as to from what types of
structures wA-elements can be extracted or not. This study tried to find out the nature of the Ilanguage
related to Subjacency and grammatical wA-movements in first language (LI) Lankan
English (LE) users. For this purpose, the study employed a grammaticality judgement task
(GJT), which comprised sentences with Subjacency violations and those with grammatical whmovements
applying the norms of Older Varieties of English (OVE) - the token sentences used
in the GJT were similar to those sentences, I mean, followed the same syntactic patterns, that
were used in the studies carried out on Subjacency among modem native speakers of English
(OVE) as control groups. The results of the OVE groups suggest that they agree on
(un)grammaticality of w/i-movements. The subjects of my study use L E as their L I or one of
their L i s— the subjects are mostly Colombo-based and use Sinhala as one of their L i s or
second language with one or two exceptions, where the subjects use Tamil as one of their L i s.
Based on their linguistic intuition, the subjects gave values for the grammaticality of the token
sentences using a gradient scale ranging from (-2) to (+2) assigning the highest negative value
for complete ungrammaticality and the highest positive value for complete grammaticality.
Results show that there is strict adherence to Subjacency observation among the LI L E users;
however, there is a marked reluctance among many of the L I L E users to extract w/i-elements
across complex structures even when these extractions can be considered completely
grammatical in OVE. A pattern observed in the finding is that L E users feel more comfortable
with moving adjuncts as wA-elements across complex structures rather than arguments.
Whether this observed syntactic phenomenon should be considered as an indicator for a variety
specific linguistic feature of LE, or, considering the fact that several of the subjects have
considered the movements as grammatical or somewhat grammatical, as an indicator for
language change in LE, or the different levels of complex syntactic structures the subjects are
exposed to, is a matter for future in-depth study and analysis.
